William Wollaston’s “The Religion of Nature Delineated”

At Wendy McElroy’s
suggestion I read William Wollaston’s The Religion of
Nature Delineated. It is at times brilliant and ahead of its time, at
times utterly daft and pedestrian. As a writer, Wollaston is much more
straightforward and easy-to-read than many of his
18th century contemporaries, and even when he goes
astray he often does so in interesting ways.

The Religion of Nature Delineated by William Wollaston

His goal in the book is to try to discern ethical truths solely by combining
observations about the natural world with rational deductions from these
observations — to see if he can derive a sort of universal, baseline religion
without the aid of divine revelation but merely by drawing logical conclusions
from the available facts. What sort of religion might you come up with if you
had no assistance from God or his prophets other than the light of reason, the
evidence of the senses, and a steadfast regard for truth?

Religion, to Wollaston, is synonymous with ethics. The science of categorizing
human acts into the categories of good, evil, or indifferent is the basis of
religion. He acknowledges the many attempts to formulate a rational rule to
govern this categorization, and that these attempts have failed, but he
asserts that such a rule must exist, and, furthermore, that he has discovered
it. The opening chapter of his book, probably the most interesting one, gives
his rule and the reasoning behind it. It goes a little something like this:

All acts that can be categorized as good or evil must be acts of an
intelligent and free agent, capable of choosing or not choosing the
act.

Propositions are true if what they express conforms to how things actually
are.

A true proposition may be denied either by words or by deeds. By deeds, I
don’t just mean language-like gestures: sign language, pantomime, body
language, and the like. “There are many acts of other kinds, such
as constitute the character of a man’s conduct in life, which have in
nature, and to imply some proposition, as plainly to be
understood as if it was declared in words.” For example, if a company of
soldiers attacks another company, they are by virtue of their attack
stating the proposition that the other company is their enemies, which may
be a true or false proposition. Or, if you promise to do A but instead do
B, you are by the very act of doing B instead of A denying the truth of
your earlier promise.

This does not mean that only those
actions that actually communicate something to someone else, or that are
theoretically intelligible by someone else, are those that deny
propositions. In the privacy of your home, when you reach for the
salt-shaker, you are asserting the proposition: this food isn’t salty
enough yet.

Some act-statements, like speech-statements, may
be conventional (for example, in some religions, putting on head covering
is a sign of reverence; in others, taking off your hat means much the same
thing). Other act-statements are more universal and can said to be natural
in a way that words never can be because words are always particular to
some language.

“Whoever acts as if things were so, or not so, doth by his
acts declare that they are so, or not so, as plainly as he could by words,
and with more reality. And if things are otherwise, his acts contradict
those propositions which assert them to be as they
are.”

No act that contradicts a true proposition can be right.

False propositions are wrong, so acts that assert them cannot be
right.

True propositions express the actual relationship between a subject and
an attribute of that subject. An act that denies this relationship
denies reality and is therefore wrong, against nature/reality.

If there is an omnipotent Creator-God, then to deny what is actually
true is to deny what God has deliberately called into being. This is
not to say that we should be fatalisticaly blasé in the face of
an evil act, for instance, but that in such a case we should acknowledge
as being a true proposition that an evil act occurred.

There are eternal truths that seem to be part of the Divine intention,
like “every thing is what it is; that which is done cannot be
undone,” and to deny any particular truth that fits this pattern
is also to deny the eternal truth itself, which is in effect to deny
God. To deny anything to be true that is in fact true, and that an
omniscient God therefore knows to be true, is also to put yourself in
opposition to God.

To deny what is true in any instance is to embrace absurdity and to put
truth and falsity, good and bad, and knowledge of any sort out of
reach.

To deny what is true is to transgress against reason, “the great
law of our nature.”

Acts of omission as well as those of commission can be assertions or
denials of propositions. This requires a bit more subtlety to deal with,
but, for example, you do not necessarily deny that The
Religion of Nature Delineated is an interesting book by not
personally being interested enough to read it, but you do deny that
everyone ought to read some Shakespeare if you don’t bother to read
any yourself. If you don’t read anything at all, you deny that
reading is valuable, or that the value it gives is important, or some
proposition of the sort. Certain truths seem to imply certain actions:
if I am rich, and there are poor, were I never to be charitable I would
be in a way denying the truth of wealth and poverty by not taking the
obvious step such things imply. If I neglect to help someone in dire
need when I am the best or only person able to help, I am making an
assertion about myself, that person, the straits that person is in, human
nature, and so forth.

To judge rightly what a thing is, all of those attributes of the thing
that are capable of being denied must be taken into account. For example,
if a thief rides off on another man’s horse, the thief isn’t
denying that it’s a horse by doing this, but that the horse
was another man’s property. The thief’s actions imply certain
assertions about the horse (I can do with it what I please, it’s a
horse, it’s safe to ride) but don’t imply anything about
others (it’s a filly, it’s mottled brown, it was born in
Kentucky).

Truths are always consistent with one another, so you won’t ever
find yourself in a situation in which you must deny one truth in order to
affirm another. What if you make a promise that you are later unable to
keep because of some other obligation? “It is not in man’s
power to promise absolutely. He can only promise as one who may
be disabled by the weight and incombency of truths not then
existing.”

When an act would be wrong, forbearing that act is right; when the
omission of an act would be wrong, doing that act must be right.

Moral good and evil are coincident with right and wrong.

Acts of omission and of commission that have the effect of denying what
is true are morally evil. Their opposites are good. Acts that have no
propositional content are indifferent.

Denying any truth is evil, but some such denials are worse than others.
All sins are not equal. For instance, it is worse to deprive someone of
an estate than of a book, even though in both cases you are denying the
truth of ownership: the estate might be worth 10,000× the book, in
which case the evil is also 10,000× greater. (He tries to justify
this by saying that the owner’s valuation of the property is somehow
part of the truth statement that the thief is denying, which I think is
probably incorrect. The thief isn’t saying anything about the value
of the property to the owner by stealing it, necessarily.) The quantity
of evil/guilt involves “the importance and number
of truth violated.” Good actions, that is, acts that serve as true
propositions, are also good in degrees, by inverting the evil that would
be the result of their omission (or, I suppose, their commission
in the case of good deeds of omission, but that seems to lead into a
thicket: aren’t I just about always failing to commit a near
infinite number of possible sins?)

Though some deny that there is any such thing as good and evil, indeed
there is just as there is a difference between true and false. Indeed:
they resolve to the same thing. There have been many attempts to find a
criterion or rule for distinguishing good things from evil ones, or some
ultimate end that serves as the criteria by which good and evil acts can
be distinguished, but these have all either failed, or are incomplete, or
are circular tautologies, or eventually just reduce in practice to this
rule I have proposed. (Here he reviews several such attempts.)

The natural existence of good and evil implies natural religion. Religion
is “nothing else but an obligation to do… what ought not to
be omitted, and to forbear what ought not to be done.”

“[E]very intelligent, active, and free being should so behave
himself, as by no act to contradict truth; or, that he should treat every
thing as being what it is.”

From here, Wollaston answers some possible objections to his scheme, most of
which are the result of misunderstandings of what he’s getting at. He slips
up, I think, when he discusses the case of whether or not it would be a wrong
denial-of-truth to refuse to tell an enraged murderer where his prospective
victim is hiding. Among his answers here is that “no one can tell, in strict
speaking, where another is, if he is not within his view. Therefore you may
truly deny that you know where the man is.” This seems to subvert his
scheme by hinting that you can behave deceptively while holding on to the
truth verbally and legalistically and thereby stay on the straight and narrow.
In general, his answer to this objection seems to rely less on the scheme he’s
introduced and more on ordinary folk ethics, which seems odd to me, since I
don’t think this objection is particularly threatening to his scheme.

Wollaston also says that some truth-denying sins are worse than others. Some
are so minor as to be “evansecent or almost nothing.” Furthermore, it is only
those truths that have some reference to other living things that we really
must respect. If we don’t treat a television as a television but instead treat
it as a target at a shooting range, we don’t commit a sin against the truth
(as we would if we treat it as our television when it actually
belongs to someone else). To me, this seems an important qualification tacked
carelessly onto Wollaston’s scheme, and weakens the original justification for
it, which was that a denial of truth as such was a denial of truth
as an aspect of God and therefore a denial of God, without any regard
for whether that truth had some relation to other living things.

That concludes the first chapter.

Chapter two concerns happiness. Wollaston agrees with Aristotle that happiness
is best measured over the sum of a person’s life rather than in any particular
time-slice. He also asserts that to make onesself happy is the duty of every
intelligent being, and that we must take this truth about intelligent beings
into account in our dealings with others.

Furthermore, nothing that denies truth can be productive of the true and
ultimate happiness of any being; neither can the practice of truth make any
being unhappy (in this life-wide sense of happiness). This bold assertion he
bases on his understanding of the nature of God (which he’ll expand on later):
nobody has the power to increase his happiness by setting his will above the
evident will of God, and, also, it would be absurd to think that God would be
so sadistic or defective as to punish people for conforming to His will.
Because of this, our duty to make ourselves happy and our duty to conform in
word and deed to the truth amount to the same thing, and this is our true
religion.

Chapter three concerns reason and epistemology. If we cannot actually know the
difference between true and false, or at least have some good heuristics, then
all of Wollaston’s project is for naught. He starts by giving an interesting
and sophisticated description of how sense qualia and certain ideas and
relationships are both examples of immediate mental data. These ideas/qualia
as such are irrefutable data that we can use as axioms. Wollaston
also asserts, less rigorously, that reason can in fact obtain new truths for
us (if not, what else is it for?).

The practice of reason is another term for what is also called conformity to
truth or the pursuit of true happiness, that is, the true natural religion.
Each person must be his own judge of truth: “to demand another man’s assent to
any thing without conveying into his mind such reasons as may produce a sense
of the truth of it, is to erect a tyranny over his understanding and to demand
a tribute which it is not possible for him to pay.”

There are also things we can’t determine the truth of, but there may be
various ways in which we can get a probable truth, and he discusses
several such heuristics, for instance, which sorts of authorities to trust.
In such cases, you’re as obligated to conform to the probability as in certain
cases you are obligated to conform to the truth: you put your money down on
the best odds, even though you can’t know how the dice will roll ahead of time.

Chapter four concerns the free will problem. Is it even possible for people
to conform to the truth? Wollaston acknowedges that people are not completely
in control of their actions, and that you can only be morally obligated to
do what you are in fact capable of doing. You are obligated to conform with
truth only so far as your faculties, powers, and opportunites allow, and to
the extent that the truth is discernable by you. That said, don’t act like
this is an available cop-out. You must endeavor “in earnest… heartily; not
stifling [your] own conscience, not dissembling, suppressing, or neglecting
[your] own powers.”

Wollaston thinks that the free will problem comes up in ethical philosophy as
a sort of dodge by people who are hoping for some sort of excuse for not
taking ethical problems seriously. If you were told that a great reward was
waiting for you in the next room if you were just to go and retrieve it, you
wouldn’t waste time discoursing about whether or not you had the free will
necessary to undertake such a task — you’d just get up and go. But in the
realm of ethics, people for some reason feel obligated to dive into the
free-will labyrinth rather than just staying on the straight and narrow path
to what they know is best.

In chapter five, Wollaston decides to prove the existence of God and describe
His nature. It’s your standard
first cause
argument (every effect has a cause stretching back through time, but there
must have been some original uncaused cause to set this all in motion)
combined with the argument from design (isn’t the universe amazing and don’t we see evidence of God’s order and benevolence everywhere?).

Wollaston also shares some thoughts on the compatability of the divine
regulation of the universe and of divine omniscience with free will; whether
petitioning an omniscient God with prayer makes any sense; what God might have
had in mind by introducing free will into His creation; whether God might from
time to time rescind our free will to set us on a particular course; why it is
that God seems sometimes to reward the wicked and punish the good; and how it
is that we have immaterial souls planted in us by God.

To the certain relief of his publisher, Wollaston discovers that the truths
about God that any heathen could discover by diligently applying reason to
those facts and relations immediately available to our minds conform
remarkably well to contemporary Christian worship: we should feel gratitude
to our creator, and express this in prayer; we should eschew idolatry; we
should form into congregations and worship together; and so forth.

In chapter six things get interesting again, as Wollaston derives and maps
out what in modern anarcho-libertarian popular writing is called the
“non-aggression principle.”

People are distinct individuals, each with certain unique properties.

Each person has by nature the possession of certain things, such as his
own life, limbs, labor, and the products thereof. That is to say that
basic property rights are inherent in the state of nature and don’t
require government or custom to come into being.

Whatever is inconsistent with the general peace & welfare of mankind
is inconsistent with the laws of human nature and therefore wrong. The
right laws for a society are those that produce the greatest happiness
for the greatest number.

Reason respects cases, not persons, so something that would be true for
person A with respect to person B would also be true for B with respect
to A if the case were inverted.

In a state of nature, people are equal in terms of dominion (with the
exception of the natural dominion parents have over their children).
Power does not confer right — if it did, it could confer the right
to anything, including denial of the truth, which we’ve already
proven to be wrong.

“No man can have a right to begin to interrupt the happiness of
another.”

However, you do have the right to defend yourself, to recover what is
stolen from you, or to make reprisals against those who have aggressed
against you (to recover the equivalent of whatever you have lost by the
injustice). To have a right to anything means also that you have the
right to defend your possession of that thing.

Alas, his first justification for this is that each of us has a natural
capability and instinct for self-preservation, and that it would be
absurd for us to have such a thing and not be allowed to use it. It
seems to me like this same logic could be used to justify aggression.

Initial property rights are established by first possession or by
something being the product of one’s own labor, and last until
they are voluntarily relinquished by the possessor. Stolen property,
if it is never reclaimed, may eventually lose its taint as it is passed
from hand to hand or generation to generation, so it is not necessary to
be able to trace every possession back to a first legitimate owner.

A property right may be transferred by compact or donation. Among the
rights a person has by virtue of ownership is the right to dispose of
property in this way, and both the giver and the receiver are acting
within their rights. Trade is mutually beneficial and commerce is a
social good.

Therefore: property is founded in nature and truth.

If you don’t dispose of your property by compact or donation, it
is yours until you die. If someone else uses your property without your
consent, they are in effect denying the truth of your ownership, in
violation of the principles of chapter 1.

If something is your property this means exactly that you have the sole
right of using it and disposing of it.

If you use something or dispose of it, you are simultaneously declaring
the proposition that it belongs to you. (Borrowing or renting something
is a special case, in which you declare that the thing is yours for
the time allowed without doing violence to the truth.)

Injustice means usurping or invading the property of another; justice
means quietly permitting to everyone what is theirs.

To not do violence to the truth you must avoid injustice. Injustice is
wrong and evil.

To carelessly cause suffering in others, or to delight in the suffering
of others, is cruel. To be insensitive to the suffering of others is
unmerciful. Mercy and humanity are the opposites of these.

Those who religiously regard truth and nature will, in addition to being
just, also be merciful and humane, these things being right.

Let me reiterate that.

Therefore: murder or injury (not in self-defense), robbery, stealing,
cheating, betraying, defamation, detraction, defiling the bed of another
man, and so forth, as well as tendencies to these things, are heinous
crimes (tendencies include things like envy, malice, and the
like).

The value of something (for instance, when calculating compensation for
injury) is determined by how the rightful owner values it, not by some
objective standard and certainly not by the standard of the person who
behaves unjustly with respect to it. A crime done in secret (for
instance, to sleep with a man’s wife behind his back) is still an
injury and a violation of the truth.

Another interesting thing in this section is that Wollaston seems to anticipate
Kant’s
categorical imperative, for instance when he says that a person who breaks
a promise “denies and sins against truth; does what it can never be for the
good of the world should become an universal practice…” (Wollaston died
the same year Kant was born.)

Most of what Wollaston concluded in this chapter would be simpatico with
modern anarcho-capitalists and libertarians, though many would cringe at his
attempts to find a utilitarian grounding for his scheme, and the objectivists
would quibble at the altruism involved in Wollaston’s mandate of mercy.

But in the following chapter, Wollaston reintroduces and justifies government,
though he does this along classical liberal lines that probably wouldn’t leave
all of the modern fans of the previous chapter behind:

Man is a social animal. Even if there were not many advantages to
living socially, as individuals we would inevitably come up against
other people. Disputes are inevitable. There will be vicious and
ambitious people who will strive to become more powerful and thereby
more troublesome to the rest of us. It is natural, therefore, that good
people will form local alliances of mutual support and defense.

The purpose of society is the common welfare of those in it.

People enter into society for that purpose, which implies certain rules
or laws according to which they agree to be governed. This means that
they must settle on certain areas of unanimous consent, certain methods
for resolving disputes, a system of punishments and deterrants to
discourage offenses, and on a method of protecting the alliance from
outside attack.

Such laws must be consistent with natural justice in order to be in
harmony with truth and thereby not evil. (Like Robert Nozick, Wollaston believes that a state can naturally emerge from anarchy without violating natural rights along the way.)

A society with laws implies a hierarchy, with governors and governed,
judges, magistrates, and the like. This seems to rule out anarchy,
though Wollaston says that “if the society has none [no executors
of the law, or no laws, it’s not exactly clear what he means], it
is indeed no society, or not such a one as is the subject of
this proposition” so maybe he’s leaving open the
possibility.

A person may relinquish some of his natural rights and put himself under
the control of laws and governors in order to gain the protection of
being in a law-governed society. This is a form of contractual exchange,
in which a person gives up something and gets something the person feels
is more valuable in exchange, and so this is no violation of the truth as
laid out in the previous chapter. (Indeed it would be a violation of the
truth not to make such an advantageous exchange.)

This exchange, says Wollaston, may either be explicit or implicit. If you
take advantage of those privileges that are not your natural rights but
are only available to you as a citizen of a commonwealth, you implicitly
own allegiance to the laws that go along with it, even if you have not
explicitly taken an oath or what have you. Merely accepting the
protection of a state, or choosing to live within its borders, is an
implicit acceptance of its laws.

This does real damage to the scheme Wollaston set up in the previous
chapter, in which he said that the value of something is set by the
rightful possessor of it, and that only the rightful possessor has the
right to use or dispose of it. This modification reminds me of the
people who set up shop at road medians, who, when you’re stopped at
a red light, wash your windshield without asking you if you want their
service, and then act as though you owe them payment for a service you
never requested.

Once you become a member of a society, you need to respect not only the
natural rights of the people in it (as described in the previous
chapter), but any conventional or legal rights that the society
establishes: for instance, their titles to property, or the privilege of
the state to resolve disputes (rather than individual initiative to seek
redress), or subordination to legal authority.

When the law is silent, or impotent, people retain their natural rights,
and should behave as described in the previous chapter. If the law is
contrary to natural justice, “one of them must give way;
and it is easy to discern, which ought to do it.”

Societies established like the ones described in this chapter have a
right to defend themselves against other societies. “War may
lawfully be waged in defense and for the security of a society, its
members and territories, or for reparation of injuries.” This is
deliberately parallel to his formulation of an individual right in the
state of nature. Nations with respect to other nations are situated
like individuals with respect to other individuals in the absence of a
state (at least “so far as they have not limited themselves by
leagues and alliances.”) Another way of looking at this is that
a nation may defend collectively the agglomerated individual rights of
its citizens against the unjust aggression of an outside individual or
group of individuals under the very same principles that individuals in
the state of nature can defend their rights against one another.

Chapter eight concerns families and kinship: the nature of marriage, the
responsibility of parents for children, the authority of parents over
children — “I have designedly forborn to mention that authority of a
husband over his wife, which is usually given to him, not only by private
writers, but even by laws; because I think it has been carried much too
high. I would have them live so far upon the level, as
(according to my constant lesson) to be governd both by reason” — the
debt of gratitude and other duties children owe parents, and the justification
for us not treating all men as brothers but actually treating our kin better
than everyone else.

Absolute maxims about individual liberty favored by some libertarian and
anarchist thinkers often seem to run aground on the parent/child relationship.
By what right do I as a parent interfere with my child’s liberty to run out
into traffic? Well, it’s not hard to come up with some good reasons, but it
can be hard to shoehorn them in alongside certain confidently-asserted
principles about liberty. So it’s a sign that Wollaston takes the subject
seriously that he includes this chapter.

He also tries to guard against the monarchist gambit of sneaking tyranny in
through this gap by analogizing the relationship of a king to subjects to that
of a parent to children. Wollaston says this won’t fly for a number of reasons.

The final chapter concerns human nature. It reiterates our duty to devote
ourselves to truth, reason, and virtue (three names for the same thing). Some
of the self-facing virtues are prudence, temperance, chastity, and frugality,
but Wollaston is quick to stress that these are not virtues of self-denial so
much as of rational self-interest. Chastity, for instance, is not the
avoidance of sex, or of the pleasure from sex, but it’s knowing how best to
fit sexual pleasure into our lives in a way that is compatible with our
long-term goals and with other virtues.

Virtue, says Wollaston, tends to lead to happiness; vice to unhappiness. It’s
not as though “virtue can make a man happy upon a rack” or dissolve all the
misfortunes we may encounter, but in any situation, the most advantageous act
and the virtuous act coincide (vice can’t make you happy on a rack either).

Wollaston goes on at great length to speculate on the nature of the soul
(which he describes at first in a way that we might use the term “mind” for).
He rejects three monist hypotheses to resolve the mind-body problem: 1) that
all matter thinks, 2) that certain configurations or motions of
matter generate thought, 3) that thinking is an epiphenomenon of some sort
that accompanies certain configurations of matter. Instead, he asserts that
thinking is a property of some special, non-material substance that God
attaches to some sort of diaphanous interface in our brains that allows it to
receive impressions from the physical world and to direct our bodies.

This substance is the soul, and, it being non-material, we have no reason to
expect that it expires when the body it is attached to dies. From here,
Wollaston makes a number of ill-supported speculations about the nature of the
soul. Worst, he reasons that there must be an afterlife because he has proven
that there is a just and reasonable God, and yet on earth there is so much
cruelty and injustice and disorder, that only a just and harmonious afterlife
could possibly balance the scales and be compatible with God’s nature. Alas,
the proof of God he relies on as one of the axioms of this argument itself
proceeded from the observation that the universe was so orderly and benevolent
that it must be the creation of a just and wise God. So Wollaston has to
utterly contradict himself to try and prove his point.

In all, once he gets past some interesting and well-considered thoughts on the
mind/body problem, the rest of this chapter in which he gives his speculations
about the nature of God, the destiny of the soul, and so forth are pretty
worthless: just his own opinion of how he would organize the universe were he
a just, omniscient, and omnipotent creator. He even uses that most desperate
gambit of saying that even if the immortality of the soul cannot be
demonstrated, “yet it is certain the contrary cannot”! From which he slides
into Pascal’s
Wager. (His version is slightly improved by his assertion that a virtuous
life that is to our advantage from the standpoint of eternity also happens to
be to our advantage from the standpoint of our mortal lives.)

His concluding advice: “let our conversation in this world, so far as we
are concernd, and able, be such as acknowledges every thing to be what it
is (what it is in itself, and what with regard to us,
to other beings, to causes, circumstances,
consequences): that is, let us by no act deny any thing to
be true, which is true: that is, let us act according to
reason: and that is, let us act according to the law of our
nature.”

In late 2016, The
Religion of Nature Delineated was released as a free (as in speech, and
as in beer) ebook, with a number of readability improvements for the benefit
of today’s reader. You can download it from this link.

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